Insights Portal

Energy tablet app (B2B). Company project, London (2016).
Business context: Utilities industry / Client: ONZO / My role: Manage and execute the whole project as Lead Designer / Target audience: Partners (global senior decision-makers)

This energy tablet app has full access to the energy-use information to identify users’ needs, optimizing both individualized insights and connected interactions to improve business operations. In addition, it combines data from household smart meters and other sources to understand why each home uses energy in the way that it does.
The main goal was to target customers to help reduce peak demand, transforming big data into valuable segmentation.

Demand Response

We designed two sections and this one uses residential behavioural response to reduce network outages. A heat map of London identifies the “hot” parts of the network at different times of day, using historical data to predict the peaks for the immediate future. Customers can be targeted where there is a danger of demand exceeding capacity to supply.

The insights analysis automatically segments a group of customers, and the biggest group is typically those who have low impact to help (no action). The remaining customer segmentation includes different characteristics detected in the energy signal, so the platform sends different messages to each group type to deliver usage reduction.

Tariff Optimisation

This section identifies the tariff that is best for both customer and utility. Therefore, insights allow to find out which customers would benefit from a different tariff, either directly, or with an acceptable amount of behavioural change.

Bottom navigation bar (left to right): 1. The Existing tariffs help identify if time-of-use tariffs are having an effect on customer behaviour; 2. The Simple Recommender segments customers who would benefit from being on a different tariff; 3. The Behavioural Change applies more sophisticated analysis to identify those customers who would benefit from a different tariff; 4. Optimiser: the customer segmentation is carried out automatically and appropriate messages generated depending on the best action.

Finally, recommended actions based on what the achievable behavioural response is for each home. It is worth highlighting two key points: 1. Positively engage with customers – be their trusted advisor; 2. Drive widespread, sustained behavioural change that suits the available supply profile of generational assets.

Evaluation

A high-fidelity prototype that feels real was shared at European Utility Week. As a result, we gained equity funding from new investors as well as new customers, improving company profits.